Typically, enterprise applications are executed on dedicated compute resources. Often, an enterprise will include a variety of computing environments for different instances of the application such as production, test, and development. These multiple computing environments are typically the same size and capacity as the live or production instance. Moreover, the non-production environments are frequently idle for extended periods of time. This normally results in large amounts of wasted computing resources and labor expense in maintaining and administering these various environments.
Currently, enterprises may use provisioning as an attempt to address these issues. Generally, provisioning is the process of instantiating compute resources to the enterprise application by copying the local disk from a repository to the resource. The resource is then booted with the provisioned operating system and software through a process that normally takes over ten minutes.